About this item
The capstone of a quarter-century career in poetry, To the Boy Who Was Night collects the poetry published by Rigoberto González since 1999, including selections from five previous books as well as new work. Mirroring González's personal trajectory, the arc of this work articulates the course of a life: these poems recall leaving a beloved homeland, confront masculinity and sexuality in new adulthood, imagine the earth devoid of human inhabitants, descend into the realm of ghosts, and return to arrive at Dispatches from the Broken World. This latest section ventures into foreign terrain - an autobiographical confrontation with isolation and the aging body. His lyrical exploration, like the weather reports scrawled on ancient temple walls, will preserve this age-old message: "likely a poem, surely an epitaph.
About the Author
Rigoberto González was born in Bakersfield, California and raised in Michoacán, Mexico. The son and grandson of migrant farm workers, he is the author of seventeen books and the editor of Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina, and Latino Writing and Xicano Duende: A Select Anthology of Alurista's poetry. The recipient of Lannan, Guggenheim, NEA, NYFA, and USA Rolón fellowships, winner of the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the American Book Award, The Poetry Center Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the PEN/Voelcker Award in poetry, he is critic-at-large for the L.A. Times, contributing editor for Poets and Writers Magazine, on the Board of Directors of the Poetry Society of America (PSA) , and Zoeglossia: A Community for Writers with Disabilities, and on the Writers Council for The Center for Fiction. Currently, he's Distinguished Professor of English and director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers-Newark. He lives in Newark, NJ.
